NEW YORK – Every franchise has its own set of dysfunctional underpinnings. The Knicks just happen to have enough to fill a highlight reel, with a profusion of ownership blunders, financial mismanagement, mismatched pieces, guns, whacky weed, suspensions, rampant underachievement, and so on.

And that’s just this season, which belonged in a wheely bin out back before it even got out of December.

But regardless of the team, it’s up to the GM or whoever gets the big bucks to make the dysfunction a little more manageable as time goes by. The problem is that your franchise is crowded with Alpha types with egos that are raging out of control – players, coaches, and owners alike – so management starts with galvanizing 15 brains to go in the same direction. This is much harder that identifying talent – your grandmother can identify talent, perhaps better than Jim Dolan can. But getting 15 brains together, that is an art.

So it’s hard to know whether Phil Jackson can do that from an office, or whether any dose of Jacksonian Wisdom will change anything at all.

Whenever somebody new comes on board, there’s always a sorting out of the power center, but in NYC, there is still a megalomaniac running the joint. And no matter who arrives on a milk white steed, the owner will still be impetuous, emotional, and volatile, and probably cut the legs out from the guy who does day-to-day management no matter how much autonomy his contract calls for.

So there’s your first problem. By now, Jackson knows the source of this team’s dysfunction, and it’s a problem he’s never had to deal with in his career, not even in Albany or San Juan. He knows Dolan got rid of Donnie Walsh when he was halfway through a massive toxic dump cleanup. He knows Dolan dumped Glen Grunwald after he built the best Knicks team in 16 years. He knows that you don’t look downstream to see the source of the pollution.

Second problem: This is not where his experience is. His expertise is in what happens downstream, which nobody has given much thought to since this happy Phil vibe began last week.

“I can’t pretend to be an expert in leadership theory,” Jackson writes in his latest book, Eleven Rings, though every other page is a startling recoil from that toe-dip into modesty.

“But what I do know is that the art of transforming a group of young ambitious individuals into an integrated championship team is . . . .a mysterious juggling act that requires not only a thorough knowledge of the time-honored laws of the game, but also an open heart, a clear mind, and a deep curiosity about the ways of the human spirit.”

We concede that this is essential to success in this league.

We cannot deny that Jackson’s teams, more often than the others, possessed such esprit de corps.

We appreciate how he has developed an effective people-management philosophy.

We are even impressed that he can condense Kant or some other epistemology you took freshman year, splash it with eastern spices (MSG?), reshape it into a koan, and slam it into a fortune cookie so that it appeals to the attention span of the average NBA player.

But we doubt that you can sell this winning formula from a balcony in Playa Del Rey, which sounds like his plan.

We have misgivings that a zen master can preach the precepts of Mindfulness while J.R. Smith stays engaged for as long as it takes to tweet his butt cheeks.

And we are certain that as long as Jim Dolan still owns the team, you're just kidding yourself if you believe things can change.

That’s why, in the end, Jackson won’t succeed here. The task ahead borders on absurd, if not thankless. Jack McCallum, basketball author and singular wit, suggests that Jackson might as well consider becoming Premier of Crimea while he’s at it.

So why consider it? He’s a guy who likes to be courted, obviously. And Dolan’s MSG has become the Last Payday Saloon for credentialed people who figure they might as well grab it while they can, as long as someone is dumb enough to shovel it.

Don Nelson. Lenny Wilkens. Larry Brown. Isiah Thomas. Amar’e Stoudemire. Even Donnie. Oh, and anyone who doesn’t cover his head with a towel after the PA guy bellows, “Once a Knick, always a Knick!”

Nobody has a right to question that. But face it, there are far better jobs, because this place doesn’t need a restructuring as much as it needs an exorcism.

That was true even before the Knicks were outplayed in the first half Monday night by a Philly team that had lost 16 in a row. They ended up winning their fourth game in a row, 123-110, but while their collective effort wasn’t exactly a spiritual experience, it managed to reflect the ancient Eastern philosophy from which they derive their inspiration. Call it Zen and the Art of Not Giving A Damn.